Hi all, want to install gentoo again, there are some years since last time and things have changed since then. Just bought a new laptop Asus Vivobook S400, not the most ideal laptop for linux use, but that's one of the reasons why i bought it, to learn, and to get it working.

Just installed a new Samsung ssd drive on 256 gb, (for /). And have one 22 gb that i want to use as a swap drive. (i know i don't need a swap drive on 22 gb, but what else can i use this space for?)

The /boot/efi/loader/entries are gummiboot related: Selecting Agrub I can issue a grub efi menu from gummiboot. Gummiboot only can start kernels from this vfat efi /dev/sda1 partition. Which is why I copy some vmlinuz there. But grub2 and refind are able to do otherwise ..._________________fun2gen2

Gummiboot only can start kernels from this vfat efi /dev/sda1 partition. Which is why I copy some vmlinuz there. But grub2 and refind are able to do otherwise ...

This is a good argument for mounting the ESP at /boot rather than at /boot/efi -- when it's mounted this way, the kernel will wind up on the ESP when you place the kernel normally. You'll then be able to launch the kernel via gummiboot without copying the kernel to a second (or non-standard) location. OTOH, this is a somewhat unusual way to use the ESP. If you dual-boot, it exposes your kernels to greater risk of damage from other OSes. You might also need a bigger ESP. (Microsoft in particular creates a rather dinky little 100MiB ESP by default. That's adequate for one or two kernels, but not for lots of them.)

Still, on the whole it's a good tradeoff if you're using gummiboot, and maybe for rEFInd, too. (Although rEFInd ships with drivers that enable it to read ext2/3/4fs, ReiserFS, and Btrfs, putting the kernel on a FAT partition means you won't need to use these drivers, which eliminates a little extra software from the stack. All other things being equal, such simplification is generally a good thing.)

You need no boot loader at all. Just enable CONFIG_EFI_STUB and hard-code your kernel parameters in CONFIG_CMDLINE, then place your kernel image in the EFI boot partition as EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi

That is the easy way to begin with! But if you further want to experiment with cmdline blacklist etc,
you will feel the need of an additional helper as gummiboot or refind or grub2.

srs5694 wrote:

ulenrich wrote:

Gummiboot only can start kernels from this vfat efi /dev/sda1 partition. Which is why I copy some vmlinuz there. But grub2 and refind are able to do otherwise ...

This is a good argument for mounting the ESP at /boot rather than at /boot/efi -- when it's mounted this way, the kernel will wind up on the ESP when you place the kernel normally. You'll then be able to launch the kernel via gummiboot without copying the kernel to a second (or non-standard) location.

Please, try to keep and hold high some standards: Also grub expects the ESP mounted at /boot/efi.
And the little extra copy of a vmlinuz kernel is just a simple line in my kernel-make script.

Also apropos standards:
Couldn't you reuse the loader tree of Gummiboot with refind!? I would appreciate!
Or, if you see some lack in this as a standard, could you please communicte with Kay Sievers of Gummiboot?
You have some merits of the creator of the most feature rich efi boot manager. You should use that knowledge to influence the new standards. And set them and keep them, because these are really missing! Without them the life of the ignorant is difficult ...

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You might also need a bigger ESP. (Microsoft in particular creates a rather dinky little 100MiB ESP by default. That's adequate for one or two kernels, but not for lots of them.)

Yes, didn't you yourself point out on your website: There is some buggy efi firmware in the wild which cannot recognize a little ESP (under 512 MByte)?
This also is about standard: Just say the efi ESP partition has to be 512 MByte. Don't discuss lenghtly about minor things here! People will be glad to follow your adwise at some point in time: i f they change their disk to another system ..._________________fun2gen2

keet -> The Vivobook works great, installed a 7mm ssd and it became total noise free. There are two things that bothers me, the touchpad seems to be a little of up in the right corner, and the second is the EFI bios, miss the old MBR method, but i'm sure this will go over once i have tried to get it work_________________Yeah, Windows is great... I used it to download Linux!

You need no boot loader at all. Just enable CONFIG_EFI_STUB and hard-code your kernel parameters in CONFIG_CMDLINE, then place your kernel image in the EFI boot partition as EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi

The upside of this approach is the extreme simplicity (including, if you're someone into it, up to a couple seconds savings in boot time). The downside is that it's more difficult to recover if you end up with an unbootable kernel for whatever reason (especially if you copy over bootx64.efi without moving the old one to a still-accessible location on the ESP).

Gummiboot only can start kernels from this vfat efi /dev/sda1 partition. Which is why I copy some vmlinuz there. But grub2 and refind are able to do otherwise ...

This is a good argument for mounting the ESP at /boot rather than at /boot/efi -- when it's mounted this way, the kernel will wind up on the ESP when you place the kernel normally. You'll then be able to launch the kernel via gummiboot without copying the kernel to a second (or non-standard) location.

Please, try to keep and hold high some standards:

The mount point for the ESP isn't really standardized. Although /boot/efi is the most commonly-used location, it does go at /boot on some systems. Perhaps the FHS or some other document will eventually be modified to specify where the ESP should be mounted, but until then it's valid to mount it wherever it's convenient. In fact, the Freedesktop.org BootLoaderSpec, recommends mounting it at /boot under some circumstances.

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Also grub expects the ESP mounted at /boot/efi.

AFAIK, there's nothing hard-coded in GRUB to expect the ESP to be mounted at /boot/efi, although I'm sure that many specific builds do expect to see it there. (This would be an issue with the scripts that generate GRUB configuration files, though; the GRUB EFI binary doesn't know or care where the ESP is mounted in Linux.) Of course, the scenario under discussion involved using gummiboot as a boot loader, so GRUB's idiosyncracies aren't a factor.

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Also apropos standards:
Couldn't you reuse the loader tree of Gummiboot with refind!? I would appreciate!

If you mean the /loader directory and its configuration files on the ESP, I've considered doing this, and it wouldn't be very hard; however, at the moment only gummiboot uses it. (There's a patch for GRUB to make it use these files, but AFAIK no distribution is actually using it.) This approach is laid out in detail in the Freedesktop.org BootLoaderSpec, but AFAIK no distribution has signed on to it, and also AFAIK the BootLoaderSpec hasn't been finalized. In short, unless and until the BootLoaderSpec becomes accepted by at least a few distributions, supporting it in rEFInd creates a risk of adding useless code that will then become difficult to remove.

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Or, if you see some lack in this as a standard, could you please communicte with Kay Sievers of Gummiboot?

The BootLoaderSpec is the work of Lennart Poettering -- or at least, my communications ended up being directed to him. I suggested several changes to the BootLoaderSpec. Some he seemed to accept, others he didn't. None have made their way onto the Web page, despite the fact that our communications were several months ago. IMHO, the BootLoaderSpec has a number of serious problems, but if Poettering won't listen to me, there's not much I can do about it.

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You might also need a bigger ESP. (Microsoft in particular creates a rather dinky little 100MiB ESP by default. That's adequate for one or two kernels, but not for lots of them.)

Yes, didn't you yourself point out on your website: There is some buggy efi firmware in the wild which cannot recognize a little ESP (under 512 MByte)?

Not quite: The buggy EFIs can recognize a small ESP just fine; but there are weird glitches that can occur, such as files that seem to disappear.

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This also is about standard: Just say the efi ESP partition has to be 512 MByte.

That would be a useless requirement in the Linux world, since many ESPs are created outside of Linux -- Microsoft creates a 100MiB ESP and Apple creates one that's 200MiB.

chrosa wrote:

so, tried the EFI stub loader method first and rEFInd after, and got no luck with either of them, when rebooting it only boots into the bios.

You haven't given much in the way of details. For instance:

How are you booting now? (What type of live CD? Or are you booting in BIOS mode from an already-installed Gentoo?)

Are you booting in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode or in EFI/UEFI mode? (load the "efivars" module and look for a directory called /sys/firmware/efi; if it's present, you've booted in EFI mode.)

Where have you installed the kernel and rEFInd?

What's the output of "efibootmgr -v"?

You can provide these answers by running the Boot Info Script and posting the RESULTS.txt file that it generates. Be sure to post it between code tags or as a link; do not post it "straight," without code tags!